What We Know About the April 19th Facebook Fundraising Outage

Adam O’Brien
|
April 19, 2023
Author’s Note : This is a developing story with a lot of unknowns. It’s easy to speculate and draw conclusions, but we're waiting to get official updates from Meta before making any official updates to this post when it comes to the issues being resolved.

**Update - 4/20/2023 at 2:15PM PM EST** Although there has been no official notice of full resolution from Meta, our team has seen Facebook fundraising tools stabilize today. Our team will continue to monitor the situation, but nonprofits should be able to proceed with fundraising efforts as normal.

Hey y’all.

Early this morning, Facebook’s fundraising tools (including Facebook Birthday Fundraisers) have been severely impacted in capabilities and operations. 


There’s no clear understanding of what caused the outage, and we’re currently waiting on an official public response from Meta before jumping into action.

What’s Impacted 

As of right now, it looks like all of Facebook’s features that drive donations are non-functioning.

Just to double check, I went through a handful of typical actions that a supporter would take to start the process of contributing to a nonprofit.


Here's those results as of this afternoon (1:30PM EST on 4/19/2023).

Facebook Fundraiser Creation

I attempted to create a new Facebook fundraiser for a nonprofit I have supported for years and am able to get through the entire creation process with no issues - till it came time to actually create the Facebook Fundraiser.

I was met with the below error message (at 1:15PM EST):

Screen shot of Facebook Fundraiser creation issues

Facebook Page Donation Button

In addition to the above, the “Donate” button had been removed:

Screenshot of Donation button being removed on main FB page

Contributing to Individual Facebook Fundraiser 

The ability to donate to an individual Facebook Fundraiser is currently unavailable thanks to a greyed out “Donate” CTA:

Removal of Donate CTA on individual Facebook Fundraiser page

ETA for Facebook Fundraising being restored

Restoration of Facebook fundraising tools appears to have been completed as of 2:00PM EST on 4/20/2023.